Posted
by
Unknown Lameron Tuesday August 14, 2012 @08:04AM
from the free-bags-of-pork-rinds-to-all-texans dept.

MarkWhittington writes with good and bad news about NASA's future budgets. From the article: "Rep. John Culberson, along with Rep. Frank Wolf, are developing a bill that will attempt to rationalize NASA's budget process and provide some long term continuity in its administration. First, a NASA administrator would be named to a ten year term. The intent is to provide some continuity in the way the space agency is run and to remove it, as much as possible, from the vagaries of politics. Second, NASA funding would be placed on a multi-year rather than annual cycle. This is of particular importance to the space agency because the majority of its high level projects take several years to run their course. If funding were fixed for a number of years, the theory goes, money could be spent more efficiently. NASA planners would know how much they have to spend four or so years going forward and would not have to worry about being cut off at the knees by Congressional appropriators year after year."
But is it more than political grandstanding in an election year? There might be a few problems: NASA could get stuck with a bad administrator, multi-year budgets might be a bit unconstitutional, etc.

It's really not so much Constitutionality as stability. Congresses don't like explicitly binding follow-on Congresses with financial obligations. (The implicit crushing force of the national debt, well, let's gaff that off like the rest, shall we?)
One Congress giveth, and another taketh away. And when you're a company trying to do 7 and 8 figure work, you can't have that.
Which is why McNamara's Nightmare [wikipedia.org] makes the DoD budget into such a Stephen King novel. The rules under which Congress will allocate mult

The constitutional aspect is derived from how NASA started. Keep in mind that some significant parts of NASA came from the U.S. Army Field Artillery Branch, which was how Werner Von Braun ended up coming to NASA. There were also several U.S. Navy programs that were folded into NASA as well, but the Army is something significant to explicitly mention.

When the U.S. Constitution was written, there was a significant concern about a standing army running around North America with the potential to stage a coup d'état and thus overthrow any civilian government that had goals and aims which were different from the Army's goals. There are many historical examples which show this concern was well founded, and one of the steps taken to control the Army is to force annual accounting to Congress on their needs and to require annual reauthorization of expenditures.

The U.S. Navy, on the other hand, was acknowledged to be quite a bit different and even when the U.S. Constitution was written it was acknowledged that some ship building programs may take several years for completion. Even acts of the Washington Administration (yes, that George Washington) through the Naval Act of 1794 [wikipedia.org] had a several year term placed upon its completion to build a fleet of six frigates that ultimately formed the core of the U.S. Navy that exists today. In fact, the U.S.S. Constitution (created in that act) is still a commissioned U.S. Navy warship even today.

I'll also point out that one of the reasons for creating the U.S. Air Force was explicitly to set up multi-year appropriations for that branch of military service that otherwise wouldn't be possible if they remained a part of the U.S. Army. It was an acknowledgement that the annual arrangements for the Army aren't sufficient for advanced airplanes that may need a multi-year contract for completion.

In this sense, what is being proposed is acknowledging it takes more than a year to build a reliable rocket, especially for things which will be taking people to other planets. The model that congress should be following for building things in space should be more along the lines of the U.S. Navy where ship will be traveling to distant locations and will be expensive to build. Certainly the notion that a rocket going into space is nothing more than a glorified artillery shell needs to be left behind. I certainly think the notion of a NASA administrator staging a coup upon the federal government with his agency backing up such a coup is laughable by any measure of the imagination.

My point in bringing up the whole thing is that the NASA budgetary process is a hold-over from the days that parts of NASA used to be a part of the U.S. Army, and that the whole notion of building rockets was considered a short-term activity. If the rockets are simply something you shoot off for the 4th of July celebrations, a short term contract would be all that is needed as well.

This isn't to say that major projects don't happen in the federal government which require a long-term commitment. The Inters

there was a significant concern about a standing army running around North America with the potential to stage a coup d'état

Your attention is drawn to Six Frigates [amazon.com]. Back in the day when the government served the people, (i.e. prior to our Progressive reversal) there was genuine disdain about standing forces because:

You say that now, but when the NASA Orbiting Weapons System (NOWS) is placed, you'll change your tune. And no one will know, either, because they'll be claiming it's all satellites and deep space observation telescopes, until that fateful day...

Because he sees this bill for what it really is, just an effort to funnel lots of federal money to Texas and to the huge government contractor industry in Virginia. Do you really think that bible-thumping Republicans John Culberson and Frank Wolf give a rat's ass about science?

No, there are good physical reasons why NASA facilities are located as close as we can get them within the U.S. to the equator. If I were to reform NASA, I wouldn't move the facilities--I would move them AWAY from Congress (who have so hopelessly politicized NASA that the agency has for 40 years been WAY more of a contractor funnel for Congressional pork than a research agency). Make them an independent agency with hardcore ethics laws to prevent either the President or Congress from influencing their duties, and maybe they could get some actual work done without worrying about which Congressman wants some graft this week.

I know it just looks like pork going to a couple states, but the alternative is what we have with the Joint Strike Fighter--the supply chain is fragmented into all 50 states so nobody wants to kill it, but it raises the overall cost of the program substantially. And science is even harder to fragment than manufacturing--scientists need to be able to work together, and with engineers, regularly to make efficient progress.

The CIA has had the same problem, actually--I have heard complaints from their people that the single biggest problem they had was the single-year budget process, and that multi-year budgeting would make their planning much, much, much easier.

Most of the current Federal budget hoo-haw is hysteria manufactured for political purposes. It was never an issue in the past.

You have it completely backwards.

The budget has always been a searingly-hot political issue. It has been one of the country's major political problems for half a century, and especially since the early/mid 1980s. It's just happens to be a hot political issue where the Republicans and Democrats aren't distinguished from one another. (Just because something is bipartison, doesn't mea

Most of the current Federal budget hoo-haw is hysteria manufactured for political purposes. It was never an issue in the past.

You have it completely backwards.

The budget has always been a searingly-hot political issue.

I think you could have simply quit right there. It was a problem in the George Washington administration, and Thomas Jefferson got into a huge pickle because he ended up agreeing to the Louisiana Purchase and in theory spending money without approval from Congress (that was sort of granted after the fact). I don't know of any time in American history when the budgetary process was not a big deal.

Heck, the fact that Parliament controlled the taxation authority was one of the things which put the House of C

No kidding. How many space platforms have been researched, started, and then killed (NERVA, Apollo Applications, Space Station Freedom, Constellation, Prometheus, etc.)? NASA could probably do more with less if they were allowed to plan things to a reasonable extent. And if all of that wasted money was used productively, we would have had an astronaut on Mars by now.

The abuse of NASA by Congress and the President is disgraceful. Every President wants to look like Kennedy and every successive Administration or Congress wants to shit of his legacy. NASA simply gets caught in the crossfire.

Sometimes NASA needs the flexibility to cancel contracts though, especially when a project goes drastically overbudget or is realized to be a bad investment. If this bill had been passed a few years ago, NASA would quite likely still be wasting a large chunk of its budget trying to get the Ares 1 rocket ready to launch in ~2014.

Projects that never complete are not completely wasted money. An MBA might think that. But knowledge is developed and it reduces the cost on future projects.

Except when the projects never get out of planning before they fall to the knife. Anything looks good on paper, but til they start building prototypes, they're not going to find the 'gotchas'. Way too many NASA projects get killed in the planning stages. THAT'S where the money gets lost, especially when the specs of the project change on a weekly basis.

Part of the problem with NASA's failure to build any new manned spaceflight vehicle since the Johnson administration (or Nixon administration if you are splitting hairs) is that you also burn out engineers. One of the reasons why engineers get involved with building things that require horrible hours and often crappy wages (compared to jobs requiring similar levels of education and talent like writing day trading software for Wall Street companies) is that they want to see their designs actually get built.

If funding were fixed for a number of years, the theory goes, money could be spent more efficiently.

I can't figure out if this would encourage or discourage the "Gotta spend every penny this year or we'll lose the money permanently for all future years" behavior.

If a multi-year budget means you get $30M for a project, in total, spread across the entire project, then you don't have the headache of spending exactly 3 mil each year for a decade so it discourages wasteful spending at the end of the year. On the other hand if multi-year budget means that $3M is set in stone for all eternity then it encourages wasteful spending.

Since wasteful spending = votes I'm going to guess it is designed to increase waste.

It would get rid of that and also the 3 months of no work between the end of the fiscal year and the calendar year. Congress has been gong down to the wire so no money can be allocated to projects until the budget is approved. When this happens at the end of September it takes a couple months to get the money turned on. Then nothing happens between Thanksgiving and New Years since so many people are using their vacation time that is use or lose.

Hey, you know: shag all that. Let's make NASA into a national http://www.kickstarter.com/ [kickstarter.com]. Pour loot into NASA, instead of these godforsaken SuperPAC ads, and we'll be all over the solar system, lickety-split.

I'd donate 20$ a month to NASA easily, without a second thought.And that's probably 1000x bigger than their portion of my taxes too.

In fact, we should do that. Set up contribution funds seperate from taxes for certain programs that people would be able to contribute to at will. I'd contribute to NASA in a heartbeat. And give people a tax credit for doing so. You dont contribute, you pay taxes like normal, You do contribute, your final tax bill is reduced by say 5%, since your donation to a specific thing you feel strongly about will likely more than offset the credit.

Would have the effect of your contribution to the whole spectrum of programs via taxes is slightly smaller, but to that specific program (or two or three) is signicantly larger.

Plus would serve as semirealtime (well, not realtime, but you get what I mean) feedback to what people actually care about. No manipulated poll data, no sample size/location cherry picking...real data on the entire nation.

I'd donate 20$ a month to NASA easily, without a second thought.And that's probably 1000x bigger than their portion of my taxes too.

Wonderful, but your numbers are a bit off. NASA's 2011 budget was a bit North of $18.4 Billion per year, or roughly $5/mo per person. This also can be translated to $6.50 or so per month per adult or to $11 per month per working American.

Actually, that isn't entirely true. They are taking a broad representation of AGI groupings. I earned $90,000 one year, had an AGI around $50-60K (don't have 1040 in front of me) and paid negative taxes. Basically all of the ridiculos tax incentives out there pushed my down to zero and then the fact that I had kids allowed me to get a child tax credit anyhow.

Now, I think it is ridiculous that we have a tax system like we do. I'm well off and the gov't should not subsidize my house buying or kid having. But

If you simply treat donations to specific government programs the way you treat donations to any other non-profit, as a deduction rather than as a credit, it could certainly lead to increased funding for popular programs without harming overall revenue.

I wonder if this would fly with the politicians though... it would either lead to reduced funds for them to give to their pet projects, because people are claiming all sorts of deductions, or it would lead to more funds, since they could reduce funding for

What about simply directing where 5% of your tax dollars will be spent?

Seriously, this is an interesting notion and it would certainly be interesting to see which agencies would get extra funding and which ones would be ignored if they depended upon popular support for funding.

I may like to give to NASA, but others may want their "discretionary tax dollars" spent on the USMC instead, or perhaps added to the budget of the Peace Corps, the EPA, or even the IRS. There may even be some who simply want the mone

What about simply directing where 5% of your tax dollars will be spent?

It wouldn't work, as it can be easily worked-around by messing with the other 95%. Say 10% of your taxes go to healthcare (0,1 if you are an American). You say 'my 5% should go to healthcare', by which probably you mean you want 15% to go to healthcare. More likely than not numbers would be messed with so still 10% would go to what you want.

We see that in Spain with the Church budget. They're supposed to self-finance (there's an X you can check or not in the income tax form, so you can state whether you w

I realize this would be largely an illusion that you are in control as a tax payer, as there would certainly be programs that get appropriations from the budgetary process that could be "made up" if there wasn't enough popular support from those paying taxes.

The problem with your example of Spanish support of the Catholic Church (something prohibited in the USA through the 1st Amendment, thus it wouldn't ever happen in the USA) is that you are given an all or nothing option. Another problem with the notion

Not that NASA is the primary customer, by any means; but they farm out enough work that it would be very difficult to increase NASA's budget without also increasing the revenues of major defense contractors. Culturally NASA has a noble mission of doing some good science, often of the flavor with limited immediate payoff; but financially they help keep defense contractors humming when demand for their more lethal products is softer than they would hope.

Not really, as the Defense portion of the Budget is about $700 billion annually and the appropriations for the two wars is about $170 billion annually.

What is an interesting dodge is not accounting for the indirect military spending. Also, if you assign the associated interest payments on all that where they belong instead of a category by themselves you get a different picture.

The cost of various wars are not considered part of the military's budget because those are separate appropriations.

If you want to get into hair splitting arguments in terms of how much one branch of the government gets over another one and if special appropriations such as the disaster relief bill following Hurricane Katrina should be recorded in terms of the overall budgetary process, go head and start that hair splitting. Appropriations often happen outside of the normal budgetary process, and I don't e

See my above comment. Why bring a bill to the floor that has zero chance of passing? The GOP does that all the time.

He's damned if he does and damned if he doesn't. If he brings the budget to the floor, and it fails, the GOP will get to scream about how their budget would cure cancer, fix global warming, and create a job for every unemployed person in America, but the mean nasty lbrls won't give it a chance. Come to think of it, they can do that if he doesn't bring that to the floor, too.

So all things being equal, maybe he doesn't want to waste the Senate's limited time in session. Or, maybe, the GOP could give them a bill that could be debated meaningfully on the Senate floor. That's how it is supposed to work. One house proposes and passes a bill, and if the other house won't pass it, then negotiations can start on the issues addressed in the plan. But, the current House's ability to compromise or negotiate can't be seen with the naked eye, so we have the situation we have.

in other words "you didnt write a bill that we like, so we are taking our ball and going home" It is the same thing as when the Ds in Wi left the state rather than have a vote. the Ds are all worried about the Rs "taking away the right to vote" from the avg american, yet they dont even want to have a vote. You say that "we know it wont win" well, no we dont, it hasnt been voted on, therefore we do not know.

in other words "you didnt write a bill that we like, so we are taking our ball and going home" It is the same thing as when the Ds in Wi left the state rather than have a vote. the Ds are all worried about the Rs "taking away the right to vote" from the avg american, yet they dont even want to have a vote. You say that "we know it wont win" well, no we dont, it hasnt been voted on, therefore we do not know.

That's due to oddity in laws.

Usually the requirements are something like 2/3rds of the legislature mus

We should make it so Congress only gets paid when they actually accomplish something, make them work on commission./pipedream

I think you're on the right track here, but I would propose something like this:

If Congress passes a budget and actually pays down the national debt, they get their salary plus a bonus.If Congress passes a balanced budget, they are paid their full salary.If Congress passes a budget with a deficit, they lose a % of their salary.If Congress fails to pass a budget, they are all ineligible for re-election.

Congress may want to raise taxes to make sure they get their bonus, but they would then run the risk of not

I agree with stopping the wars. I'd love to see military spending down two-thirds, social welfare programs designed to get people off of welfare instead of dependent on it except in the case of those who are truly unable to work, a balanced budget and increase science spending.

However, please be aware that we do spend $18B per year on NASA which is well over 1% of war costs.

Sure, but if US gov't didn't run the wars, spending on NASA could be increased by that 1% of the cost of war and at the same time the gov't spending would decrease overall. If the SS and Medicare were reformed (AFAIC they should be abolished, but let's say reformed), so that there is means testing - you don't get it if you don't need it (even those who are getting it today), then US economy could actually deleverage, stop the deficit spending, start paying back some of the debt. If the gov't size shrunk,

That will never get support from the libertarians though. You need to instead replace it with the "Union Aerospace Corporation", with a mandate to build facilities on Deimos and Phobos. What could possibly go wrong?

Who said they could manage renaming post offices? I mean, I'll grant you that Republicans are in the process of renaming anything they can for Ronald Reagan, but I don't think they can get that through the Senate.

And they wonder why the Congressional approval rating dropped below 12% this year (it's now bounced back to 17%).

Sorry you don't understand big words like "consequence of appropriations" - it means a budget.

What they have done instead is to pass "continuing resolutions" instead, which means they just keep spending the same amount they did last quarter, or last year. They have done that ever since the (bipartisan) bank bailouts and the (mostly bipartisan) stimulus spending bill. It allows them to keep spending at astronomically high rates without doing the hard work of cutting spending or securing more revenues.

Isn't it interesting, though, that the Democrats blame the Republicans in the House for there being no budget? I mean, if it's a false issue, wouldn't the Democrats not need to try to blame the House Republicans? For that matter, I suspect that if the roles were reversed, and it were a Republican Senate refusing to pass a budget, you'd be screaming bloody murder.

I know, that really is a problem. Partisan apologist like yourself can't tell the difference between your own propaganda and the truth. The budget is not an issue, it's just Republican posturing. Or it is an issue but it's the Republican's fault. Obama's drone strikes that kill innocent children isn't a problem because the war was "inherited". Or it's because he's keeping us safe. Or if it is a problem it's not his fault because the administrators and the Pentagon are entrenched and he can't do anythi

-First, a NASA administrator would be named to a ten year term. The intent is to provide some continuity in the way the space agency is run and to remove it, asmuch as possible, from the vagaries of politics.GOOD.

-Second, NASA funding would be placed on a multi-year rather than annual cycle. This is of particular importance to the space agency because the majority of its high level projects take several years to run their course. If funding were fixed for a number of years, the theory goes, money could be spent more efficiently. NASA planners would know how much they have to spend four or so years going forward and would not have to worry about being cut off at the knees by Congressional appropriators year after year."EXTREMELY GOOD.

-But is it more than political grandstanding in an election year?POSSIBLE. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't happen

-NASA could get stuck with a bad administratorAs a part of the executive branch, the president himself has oversight. Also, very unlikely; you dont get picked to run nasa if you're a bad manager

First, a NASA administrator would be named to a ten year term. The intent is to provide some continuity in the way the space agency is run and to remove it, as much as possible, from the vagaries of politics.GOOD.

Actually, neutral... or at best meaningless. The NASA administrator is already about as insulated from politics as you can get and be an appointed official. (They tend to serve multiple administrations, regardless of party.) The problem, historically, with the office of the administrator is find

This incompetent Congress can't do anything beneficial. Does anybody think that a Congress where a huge faction are only 1 step away from flat earthers SHOULD reform anything at NASA? As reasonable as some of these ideas sound they can't get past this Congress without idiocy.

Move all of Nasa's office and administrative staff to cheaper office locations. States such as Mississippi and Montana offer much lower salaries as well as cost of living. Incidentally they are also both "red" states. In fact it appears that all of the 10 lowest paid states are all red [wikipedia.org].

Although I'm hopeful about the concept, I'm suspicious until the full text of the bill is released. Considering the proponents of the bill, I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up being a thinly-veiled way to protect particular pork projects, worded in such a way that it could only be used to keep projects like SLS from being cancelled while being of limited applicability to other NASA projects. After all, after the Falcon Heavy starts launching, locking SLS into a multi-year procurement contract is probabl

If you do that they'll get out of space completely and do something else that turns a profit."Run X like a business" is simplistic bullshit unless the goal is to make money supplying something someone needs.

So long as you split the NASA launch departments from the NASA science departments it could work, and is essentially what we're moving to anyway. The science is still funded through congress, they shop around for the rocket that does the job they need for the cost and risk they like.

Sorry... when you think there is ONE system that works in all cases, you're the member of a cult.

Government agencies are not businesses. I have no problem with them getting other streams of income, but "the market" is not God. Not everything worth doing is going to make a profit, and when you start letting "the market" determine what is good for space exploration, you are at best going to have areas not explored and at worst dead astronauts.

But there is an easy dividing line for a first pass approximation: public goods. Have the government do what is non-rivalrous and non-excludeable, such as pure research, while the private sector is left to do everything else. So in the case of space exploration, it's likely true that early rocketry (until we go the ability to reliably loft satellites), early manned space, the Apollo program, the development of the Space Shuttle and the various planetary science missions could not or would not have been done

Not everything worth doing is going to make a profit, and when you start letting "the market" determine what is good for space exploration, you are at best going to have areas not explored and at worst dead astronauts.

The market demands an 80 hour work week for slave wages. Great for the guys on Wall Street. Not so much for the workers.

What "the market" represents is doing things in a financially sustainable way that people support with their actual money, rather than just moral support. "The market" means you have to convince people, rather than taking their money by fiat. "The market" means having the right to say no.

So, yeah...having the right to say no, and require that I be convinced...I'm a member of that cult, though I do realize that there are free rider problems and stuff like that. But I want space privatized not because I be

...with a business model......with goods and services......and other sorts of incomes......like Patent Royalties on all the great discoveries they've made.

Add a CEO with bonuses and a golden-parachute (fake CV-es and imaginary diplomas are a bonus). Sprinkle with some creative accounting Enron style and dust copiously with patent suits (like Apple/Samsung/Oracle). Some patent/copyright trolling (maybe following the SCO model?) for a special flavour.

I think you are looking at this from the wrong angle. They can pull in billions and still fail at their mission. All of that money would just flow back into Congress (whether this is right or wrong is another debate entirely).

You can't have a product to sell unless you have sane means of effectively generating that product.

If I'm running a lemonade stand and my only investor demands that I buy their hydroponic lemons from Alaska and I can only use beet sugar from North Dakota my business is going to have so